


A Letter for Mister Carraway

by wraithnoir



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: Gift Fic, M/M, because we know nick's bi, i'd be lying if i said i didn't get wibbly writing this, it's canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-01-10
Packaged: 2019-10-07 12:08:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17365652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wraithnoir/pseuds/wraithnoir
Summary: After the terrible hot day in New York, and the tragic journey home, Jay Gatsby told Nick Carraway everything. After that talk, he was compelled to send Nick a letter. You can always blame the post office for not delivering letters in time.





	A Letter for Mister Carraway

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jcrowquill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jcrowquill/gifts).



> This was a (late) Christmas gift for JCrowquill not because of the tragedy, but because there is something magic in knowing that when someone smiles at you, you're the only person in the room.

Dear Mr Carraway,

It’s maybe a little odd to address you this way after all of our revelations of yesterday night (or this morning, I suppose), but I feel that I’ve never learned to begin a letter any other way, so it must begin like this. I imagine you’re feeling the long hours now, because I’m sure you didn’t take the day away from your office in the city. The house is very quiet now, with all the words having run out of it. It’s like a glass bottle on its side, empty of Champagne or even a ship built inside of it. There’s just me and the slight depression where you sat before.

Speaking as candidly as we did was a great comfort to me, and I hadn’t expected it to be. I told you many things that have never been spoken aloud before, and I trust you with all of them because you’re not the type to take them lightly. I feel that you take nothing lightly, and perhaps that’s the greatest difference between you and everyone else. It makes you listen more carefully, and it makes everyone trust you. Sitting here, I wonder if you resent that. Anyway, I appreciate it, the way you listened, and the questions you knew to ask. I don’t suppose either of us expected it to go as it did though. 

I’m nearly certain there’s something foolish about putting this on a page like this, but it’ll be easier for me if you read this before I spoke to you again. That way you and I could already have it between us. I know there are other things between us too. We talked of those things last night, and there’s such a great matter in the thing of Daisy. You’re likely to think I’m wanting too much, and you wouldn’t be the first to say it, but I have something in me that pursues. First her, and now perhaps you too. I knew my challenges before I set out to have her back, which makes her pulling away now seem like something unaccounted for and unfair. That’s a childish thing to say, isn’t it? Unfair. Well, old sport, it does seem that way anyway; you can’t help how you feel about a thing, even if you and a child would feel the same way about it.

But I think about this new thing between us, and what sort of pursuit it might be. As difficult as all of this has been, these last years with all of their hope and tawdriness mixed together into a cocktail I have drunk with gladness every morning, would this be even more? What does each of us stand to lose? What sort of plan would we be able to use? How would we cover that terrain?

These are all valid questions, and there aren’t any answers that I can find yet. I’m good for planning, but bad for answers. You seem like the answer type, which is why I want you to have this in your hands before you see me next.

Forgive me for writing it out this way, as perhaps it will cause you some embarrassment to read it. I am not and have never been a strong author. You spoke of aspirations to be a novelist, so you’ll need to forgive my very amateur stylings; I can only put down here what goes through my head, and it is so very late, or again, is it so very early? But our talk seemed to turn on invisible hinges, not back and forth as a door would take us between one room and the next and then back again. These turns wound us through rooms I feel you and I had never seen before, and our words were not guides so much as things we were chasing at a strange sort of distance. It is the type of journey a man cannot take alone, no, he must take it with another. Another man always, I think.

So in my head, though I know I should be sleeping away this rotten exhaustion, I go through the journey again, over and over. I see the mundane props around us, the empty glasses and tossed jackets, an abandoned bucket by the door left by a maid who forgot to return to claim it. Then I see the setting itself, like a stage waiting for actors, with its furniture set about with anticipation. 

I see us, as if we are someone else, but then we are ourselves. Have you ever experienced that? You and I and the words between us, this house my confessional. Though that may not be the right metaphor. I’ve never kissed a priest before.

So it was the couch, that one with the white brocade and gold stripes, which replaced the one that had the dark carved wood and the pale green velvet that was smashed up during one of the evenings over the summer. I think it was in July, when you’ll remember we had that fountain that was supposed to be creating channels of sparkling wine but the mechanism kept getting stopped up by the berries in it and the dancers had all had some sort of falling out with the band leader, which I suppose everyone felt was very novel, but I honestly hadn’t known when I had them hired on. Anyway, I’m getting away from it again. You see my shortcomings in the literary vein. 

So again, we return to the couch. It was a friendly gesture for you to make, putting your hand on my knee, and it was my own moving close that pushed it up a bit to my thigh. It was the stillness that did it then; I had run out of things to say about myself, but my mouth continued on toward you and your patient listening. So before much longer, I had kissed you in a way that seemed natural, the way water far out in the ocean keeps pouring closer and closer until it finally lays itself on the shore.

I imagine that you and I have some shared experiences concerning the war, though you and I hadn’t made one another’s acquaintance yet. But we both know the way the air smelled in Europe during those summers, and the way those uniform buttons felt against your fingers. You know the parched feel of a winter throat when the shelling has stilled but you don’t trust that is has actually stopped, so you don’t dare risk moving. I suppose some of those experiences are the ones that shape you the longest, no matter how else you reconstruct yourself one you return home. We never spoke of those similarities, you and I, but we could in the future. I feel no one speaks of them. It’s another one of those things you don’t bring up at the table. It’s amazing to me, still, what people will pretend they don’t know about just to keep polite conversation moving at dinner. 

Perhaps you have done some of your writing about those times, with your experience and aspirations you keep modestly to yourself. I suppose you should send them off to publishers, if so. No one else is writing about it, or maybe the publishers are turning them away. I’m sure I have someone I can speak with about it, if you’d like to get your thoughts published. It would do someone good to read them. Here when I am talking about my own experiences, again I feel I should make some sort of apology. They’re only rough and meant just for you to read. There are some clever poets, I know, who picked out the worst bits of it all and made them into something great, and that’s a true artist. Things like that let the people who don’t know feel complicated things about the war, and they also let the soldiers feel other complicated things about it as well. I might have some volumes like that, if you’re interested. Remind me, when you see me again.

But the experiences I want to mention here have little to do with battles and things people at least want to hear a little bit about, the valor and all that stuff. Why, once when I was stationed at Samogneux, there was a night when it was stiller than bathwater, in a fall that was a ghost of a summer that didn’t know it had died yet. We had fought, and won, though my ears were still ringing with the parts of the battle that felt like loss. It was that night that I earned a different sort of experience. I shared my tent with another soldier who was from some city in New York, and after that I learned that still nights only seemed it for those who were set on the watch or who were watching from the outside. 

I don’t think that I am alone in my experiences. There were other men who seemed to come to Europe with knowledge like that already, and they taught the rest of us. Some of them had yearnings I certainly didn’t understand, but those that I did, I found I could indulge without the guilt I had when a girl in a French village smiled and lowered her head. They’re different, you understand. Again, I say I was not alone in this. Perhaps this is where you learned some of it as well.

When the war ended, everyone gave it up when they came home. I don’t know of any who didn’t, but then, I didn’t maintain my friendships with any of them. I suppose you know why. Some must have kept it up. I never looked for it, so I can’t say I know. I didn’t think about it much, didn’t let myself. I suppose you could say I had myself wrapped up in other things, and they took up so much of my time that I was more than ready to leave the war behind him and pursue the future with a diligence the past could only applaud. 

The past has a funny way of creeping up you and suddenly it’s your present and your future. Last night suddenly it all came together, in so many ways, and so please let me put it out to you now, messy words that can’t hope to really contain it all, but setting it down will let me grab onto it with both hands and that’ll let me feel that I’ve got any hold on it at all. 

I’m running circles and coming around to meet myself. Sleep would be some kind of blessing, but do you ever worry to lay your head down because you don’t what you mind will throw up on a big projection screen for you to watch while you’re unconscious? I worry about that sometimes. So for now, I’ll choose what to see against my eyelids.

You, on the sofa. It begins with you because I felt that in that moment of silence, you grew as though you had suddenly taken up the entire house. It didn’t feel empty, in that moment, but to be some aspect of you and the past you brought with you which I hadn’t properly seen before. We had just been speaking of my own, but there you were with a sugar-shell of your own stories around you. I can say with all honestly that that was exactly what was in my mind when I was moved toward you, seated on the low coffee table as I was, and gave in to an overwhelming desire, like the clouds moving before a summer storm, to kiss you.

I had no fears until the moment after that moment, when I feared you would push me aside and the night would come crashing down around me once more. But it seemed that I was made to reach dawn after dawn for you kissed me back with skill that did not seem hampered by lack of practice. Perhaps you have had more than I have since the war, but I felt, again in that particular moment, that you and I came together in a way that neither of us had known since then, and we shared an emotion and a sensation that neither of us had known since then. 

That is what I felt, that suddenly, as I moved to the sofa and you shifted as though it was your own bed that you were welcoming me into, that you and I were not in this almost stupidly grand house, but we were in a tent together with a battlefield waiting for us just outside the door, with all that uncertainty that morning and war bring to a man and a soldier. There was only comfort in your hands and gratitude in my mouth. Had we known one another like this all the time? I felt stupid and wonderful.

I hope you didn’t feel too disheveled on your way home. Afterwards I thought I should have offered you more, pressured you more to stay for breakfast and a bath. But I understand that your work is very important to you, and that’s a fine thing in a man. Also, I realize you have a good deal to think about out there in the battlefield of the city, just as I face a battlefield today. Perhaps we should compare wounds tonight? Or tomorrow night? Over drinks.

Just come over when you want to, is what I suppose I’m saying.

When I was young (I hope you don’t mind me branching off like this, one last time), I was one time handling a boat in a terrible wind. When I say terrible, I also mean wonderful; it was wild and I felt that I did not so much wish to tame it as to fight it and feel myself winner, even as the wind itself could not lose. There were hours spent just trying to make a little headway, and my hands were raw from the despairing ropes. There was, then, just for a few minutes, a sort of lull, and the water and the wind and the boat and I were all still, just for those few minutes. It all started up again, of course, and I tell you it was a nearly fruitless bit of sailing. But in those few minutes, I was the champion as much as the waves were, and we knew it both together. That was us, last night.

Oh, and forgive any mistakes in this. I jotted it down quickly and hadn’t a chance to read it over again. I think my meaning is more important than my grammar.

Just come over when you can. You know where to find me.

Gatsby


End file.
